Alberta NDP response to Question 2

Question: How would your party provide long-range, sustainable, predictable capital funding for Alberta’s large cities?

Answer:
One of the core parts of Rachel Notley’s plan for our province is to ensure that Alberta is able to get off the resource revenue rollercoaster once and for all. More details as to our plan for provincial revenue can be found in our platform at: http://www.albertandp.ca/platform. They include progressive personal income tax rates for high earners, no health levy, and a modest increase in income taxes for large, profitable corporations.

We have also committed to ensuring that the province’s transfers to municipalities remain stable and predictable, and that growth pressures are factored in when these funding decisions are made. For major granting programs including MSI, we would commit to a stable envelope of funding. For GreenTRIP, Alberta’s NDP will be taking a significant portion of the capital funding earmarked by the PCs for carbon capture and storage (once termed a “science experiment” by Jim Prentice), and moving $250 million into investment in public transit infrastructure, with other, more stable funding to come in future years as we carefully review the existing capital plan in a transparent manner.

We believe we must remove partisan choices from capital allocation decisions and to do so we have committed to the Infrastructure Sunshine List which will restore public accountability to the provincial capital plan. This will support more collaborative capital funding arrangements with municipalities.

Alberta’s NDP will provide leadership on the issue of climate change and make sure Alberta crafts solutions with stakeholders such as municipalities, as well as with other provinces and the federal government. Building more walkable, transit friendly neighbourhoods will help address climate risks as well as make growth in property assessment more financially sustainable for municipalities. The property tax municipalities receive from growth in assessment is not sufficient to finance the cost of servicing that growth. One reason in part, is because growth is often low density in nature.

Alberta’s property tax system has not been comprehensively reviewed for far too long. The processes of determining assessments and the administration of the property tax system need to be updated to meet the needs of the province as well as local authorities in the 21st century.